Vampires

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

-- Karl Marx

In this week's sift:

• Eliminate the Work Penalty. I don't know why liberals let conservatives dominate the tax-simplification issue. The Right's regressive flat-tax idea doesn't simplify anything. But there's an obvious progressive reform that would.
• Koch-Funded Study: "Global Warming is Real". Climate-change deniers expected a new study by a blue-ribbon group of scientists from outside the usual climate-science circles to show that global-warming statistics were either a mistake or a fraud. Instead, it provided independent verification of their accuracy.
• Shoot-out at the MSNBC Corral. Friday, Rachel Maddow looked straight into the camera, addressed the Koch brothers by name, and told them to "man up" and face her rather than go after her staff.
• Gracious Statesmanship and other short notes. Why can't Republicans be as gracious about President Obama's successes as Democrats were in 2003? We have Blackwater to thank for getting our troops out of Iraq. Meteor Blades says that the Iraq War was a crime, not a mistake. Still no End of the World. A vertical forest in Milan. Bra-burning in Japan. Where Occupy Wall Street has already succeeded. OWS humor. And Bad Lip Reading's Mitt Romney video.
• Last week's most popular post. For the second week in a row, Turn the Shame Aroundgot the most views (1400 last week, 7000 total). The most popular new post was Suck It Up, with around 350 views.
• Expand Your Vocabulary: metaphor shear. It's the moment when a sudden confrontation with reality makes you realize that you've been thinking inside a bogus metaphor. Anybody who takes a serious look at economics is going to experience a lot of metaphor shears.

Manipulations

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

– Eric Hoffer

In this week's sift:

• Suck It Up: Using Our Pride Against Us. Last week I talked about how the economic system uses our shame against us. This week I focus on the flip side of that phenomenon: pride.
• A View From Dewey Square. I visited Occupy Boston the afternoon after the police had dropped by. Too bad we missed each other.
• Blood and Teeth on the Floor and other short notes. Molly Erdman's parody captures everything I love about Elizabeth Warren. I couldn't make myself watch the Republican debate, so I let other people fact-check it. Plus, I whole bunch of other fact-checking and lie-exposing about Occupy Wall Street and the economy.
• Last week's most popular post. Turn the Shame Around (5700 views at last count) had the second most popular first week in weeklysift.com history.
• This week's challenge.Woody Tasch presents an interesting challenge: What if ordinary people who were doing well enough to have savings stopped investing it all in financial institutions and instead invested in local businesses they can see and use and understand? Especially in local food enterprises: "I'm talking about investing with your friends and neighbors in small organic farms, grain mills, creameries, small slaughterhouses, seed companies, compost companies, restaurants that source locally, butchers and bakers and, sure, a bee's-wax candlemaker or two. Take 1 percent of your money out of the stock market and put it into food hubs, community kitchens, community markets, school gardens, niche organic brands, makers of sustainable agricultural inputs, and more." Doing this right is more than a one-week challenge, but how would you start?

Public Shamelessness

The Weekly Sift has moved to weeklysift.com

Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is.

-- Benjamin Franklin, Sayings of Poor Richard

In this week's sift:

• Turn the Shame Around. It took Herman Cain to teach me what Occupy Wall Street is about: casting off shame and putting it where it belongs. The Powers That Be would have us be ashamed that we weren't good enough to crack the top 1%. But what is really shameful is an economy that only works for the top 1%.
• What Kind of King Do You Want To Be? Wednesday I had to explain to a teen-ager why the news is important. I told him that in a democracy the People are King, and the children are in training to be King. Whatever we need to know to be a good King, that defines what news is. And when we're a bad King, people die.
• Palin's Big Con and other short notes. Did Sarah Palin bluff running for president just to con money out of her fans? Jon Stewart thinks so. Stephen Colbert apologizes to a ham that looks like Karl Rove. The secret "kill list" for American citizens. Hank Williams Jr., Scott Brown, and Rick Perry deal with PR problems. Occupy Sesame Street. And more.
• Last week's most popular post. It was a slow week. For the second week in a row, the short notes were the top new post. The Brilliance/Pointlessness of Occupying Wall Street and other short notes garnered 127 views. Meanwhile, Six True Things Politicians Can't Say (from September 19) got 193 views. At 67K, it has accounted for about half of the page views since this blog moved to weeklysift.com in July.
• Expand Your Vocabulary. A new feature, which will alternate with This Week's Challenge. This week I want to call your attention to the term composition fallacy: assuming that what works for one person will work if everybody does it. (The classic example is standing up to get a better view at a football game.) In politics, composition fallacies are used to make structural problems in the economy look like individual moral failings. One unemployed person can network and pound the pavement and retrain until he finds a new job. Does it follow that unemployment would go away if all the unemployed tried harder? No.

Changing the System

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If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

-- attributed to Emma Goldman (but I'm having a hard time sourcing it)

In this week's Sift:

• ConConCon: Can the Grass Roots Find Common Ground? In the current money-dominated system, neither the liberal nor the conservative grass roots can pass any kind of fundamental change through the bottleneck of Congress. What if the two sides could trust each other long enough to reform our democracy, and then have the kind of democratic struggle the Founders envisioned?
• Execution Without Trial. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen who supported al Qaeda and may have been actively plotting to kill Americans. Friday he was killed by a drone missile, despite never having been indicted or convicted of any crime. How should we feel about that?
• The Brilliance/Pointlessness of Occupying Wall Street, and other short notes. Does it make sense to have a protest movement but no demands? More poor, poor bigots. You still don't know how bad paperless voting machines are. 85K Americans died last year because they weren't French. Christians face the failure of abstinence. Plus more depressing stuff, leading to baby pandas. Because who doesn't like baby pandas?
• Last Week's Most Popular Post. At 146 views, Poor, Poor Bigots and other short notes was the first short-notes post ever to out-draw the week's longer articles. Everything I posted last week ran well behind Six True Things Politicians Can't Say from September 12 (438 views last week, 67,000 total).
• This Week's Challenge. A college teacher says civics education has gotten so bad we all need to work on it: "Each one of us who does know how the system works, who votes, who has strong feelings about democracy and justice, has a responsibility to teach someone who as of yet doesn't know this." That means you, right?

Tinkering With Death

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From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.

Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun
dissenting opinion in the capital punishment case Callins v Collins (1994)

In this week's sift:

• Talking About Killing.Troy Davis' execution galvanized death-penalty opponents. But they're still talking past (not to) death-penalty advocates.
• The Sifted Bookshelf: The Hour of Sunlight.How Israeli prison made a peace activist out of Sami al Jundi.
• Poor, Poor Bigots and other short notes. Why military chaplains are not the victims of DADT repeal. The Republican debates are making the party "sound like crazy people" and hurting Rick Perry. The outrageous lie that put Herman Cain's campaign back on the map. Amusing political images. Elizabeth Warren goes viral. And more.
• The previous Sift's most popular post. Six True Things Politicians Can't Say was on its way to a respectable showing when it suddenly took off last Monday, got 8000 hits in an hour, and set a Weekly Sift record with (so far) 66,000 views. Economics Works Backwards Now got over 400 views, which would have made it the top post of a typical week. Both were voted onto the recommended list when reposted to Daily Kos -- the first time I ever hit that list two days in a row. Meanwhile, One Word Turns the Tea Party Around was having a third burst of popularity, and is now up to 17,000 views. I don't know how long I can resist the Hollywood urge to write "Six More True Things Politicians Can't Say" or "Another Word Turns the Tea Party Around".
• This week's challenge. Check out a couple of proposals that could use your support: The People's Rights Amendment declares that only "natural persons" (not corporations) have constitutional rights. And the National Popular Vote Bill circumvents the Electoral College through a compact among the states.

Turn the Crank

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No Sift next week. The Weekly Sift returns on September 26.

In truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England.

-- Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde Sismondi
New Principles of Political Economy (1819)

In this week's sift:

• Economics Works Backwards Now. It used to be about working to produce scarce goods. Now what's scarce is work.
• Six True Things Politicians Can't Say. Remember how in high school you sometimes couldn't say obvious things, because the other kids would ridicule you for it? Politics is like that.
• Toucan Sam Turns Evil and other short notes. Toucans can't symbolize a Guatemalan educational non-profit, because they already symbolize Froot Loops.
• Last week's most popular post. The whole site still lives in the shadow of Why I Am Not a Libertarian, now up to 18,000 views, and One Word Turns the Tea Party Around (8000). But though last week's Rootworms, Monsanto, and the Unity of Existence (231) and Blowing Smoke About Clouds (165) posted much more modest numbers, both did well when reposted on Daily Kos.
• This week's challenge. The next significant campaign is the Ohio referendum called Issue 2, which will be voted on this November. Issue 2 is the old S.B. 5, Ohio's union-busting bill, which was passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Kasich, but is still in limbo now that enough signatures have been gathered to force a referendum. Find out how you can help at WeAreOhio.com.

Strategies

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Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy.

– Mike Lofgren, retired Republican Congressional staffer
"Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult"

In this week's sift:

• Rootworms, Monsanto, and the Unity of Existence. Liberals like to use the word holistic, but conservatives are the ones whose ideology connects everything. Why a down-on-the-farm issue like Bt-resistant rootworms has larger lessons to teach.
• Blowing Smoke About Clouds. If you have enough media power, you can hijack the prestige of the biggest names in science and use it for your own purposes. Witness how climate deniers just hijacked the coverage of an article in Nature by researchers at CERN.
• A ConConCon and other short notes. Lawrence Lessig tries to make common cause with the Tea Party. Cheney's book tour. Geo-engineering. Rolling Stone covers voter suppression. Convoluted music copyrights. Relative costs of the Libyan and Iraq interventions. More on Libertarians.
• Last week's most popular post. Traffic mostly went back to normal last week, except for continuing interest in Why I Am Not a Libertarian (18K total views) andOne Word Turns Around the Tea Party (7K). (Between them they're still accounting for more than half the blog's traffic.) Last week's Barack, Can We Talk? got a more typical 450 views. However, it took off when I reposted it to Daily Kos, where it went to the top of the recommended list (800 recommendations, 800 comments).
• This week's challenge. Try to put words around the political message you're waiting to hear. What could a politician say or do that would give you a surprised reaction of "This person really gets it!"?